Queen Anne, two days afterwards, appointed the duke of Devonshire her lord-steward of the household, an office he had held in her sister's reign; the earl of Jersey, lord-chamberlain; sir Edward Seymour, comptroller; and Peregrine Bertie, vice-chamberlain of her household. To her consort she gave the high office of generalissimo of all her forces by sea and land. Her majesty did not forget her old grudge to Bentinck earl of Portland. By the instigation of Sarah of Marlborough, who instantly stepped into his place, she expelled him from his appointment as keeper of her park at Windsor. Among the palace-appointments which took place at this period, great interest was made with the queen by lord Godolphin, "that she would be pleased to reinstate Dr. Radcliffe as her physician;" but her majesty manifested lively remembrance of his former delinquencies by replying, "No! Radcliffe shall never send me word again when I am ill, that my ailments are only vapours." Her ministers, nevertheless, often had Radcliffe consulted respecting the health of their royal mistress, and for his prescriptions they paid, without her knowledge, vast sums.1 It may be very well believed, from the specimens printed in the course of these biographies, that when the contents of the king's letter-box, left by him at Kensington, were looked into, strange rumours arose throughout the empire, raised by those who read the royal correspondence. Among other stories, one gained ground so far, that the prosperous accession of her majesty was made the subject of congratulation in various addresses, because a plan of William III.'s for her exclusion had been discovered. Perhaps this report was founded on the proffered adoption of the prince of Wales by William III. at the peace of Ryswick; it was, however, generally supposed that an invitation for the electress of Hanover and her son to take direct possession of the throne at his death was meant. Dr. Drake was called before the house of lords, to answer " for having written a pamphlet defending the right of the queen to the crown, as if the late king had endeavoured to deprive her of it; such assertion being a libel on his memory." Dr. Drake, on being questioned "why he wrote the book?" replied, "He considered that he had just reason to write what he had written, since he 1 Biograph. Brit. heard her highness talked of disrespectfully in every coffeehouse." The lords declared that the report of the intended exclusion was false and groundless, and that her majesty's attorney-general should forthwith prosecute Dr. Drake, for writing a certain paragraph in the pamphlet.' It was not the intention of the Jacobite party to wear mourning for William III., but they were already, as well as the queen, in the deepest weeds of sable for the death of James II. The Whigs, who had hitherto flaunted in the gayest colours, now followed the lord-chamberlain's mandate, and assumed mourning for William III., as if for a father; black, therefore, was the universal hue. The mourning either for a king or queen in England being, until the present century, worn for a whole year, as if for a parent. Some Jacobite poet, angry at the general garb of woe directly after the funeral of the Whig king, wrote the following address to the mourners, which being transcribed, various copies were found scattered in the streets a few days after Anne's accession. It presents a picture of the state of the times, but not charged to the utmost, for scarcely half of William's imposts are mentioned, not even the cruel taxes on burials, wills, and property at death, inflictions which were imported from Holland, and which, it is said, gives the government nearly one-quarter of the property of every defunct who has aught to leave: "In sable weeds your beaux and belles appear, Mourn for your own misfortunes, not the king's: Mourn for your tapestry, and your statues too, 1 Boyer's Annals, 1702. 2 Among the other more familiar taxes of this era, the parliament of king William, in 1696, laid the following extraordinary property tax on all conditions of the people:-" They taxed all possessors of property according to the true value of their real and personal estates, their stock in trade or upon land, and their income upon offices and professions. But the most singular part of this cruel impost was a duty of one penny per week paid by all persons not receiving alms, likewise one furthing per week in the pound of all servants receiving wages amounting to 4l. per annum; those who received from El. to 167. paid one halfpenny in the pound per week."-Smollett's History of England, vol. ix. p. 299. 3 It is a corroborating coincidence that the histories of Framlingham Castle preserve the fact that its beautiful tapestry, once belonging to the duke of Mourn for the mitre long from Scotland gone, On salt, malt, paper, cyder, lights,' and leather. They truly mourn who are fifteen months unpaid. Your sea has oft run purple to the shore, And Flanders been manured with English gore." The muster-roll of wits and poets who were to combine for the support of the Whig junta, was described in an anonymous satirical poem of Parnell. These political lampoons were the oracles of that day, and filled the places of the "leading article" in the modern newspapers, and the political sermons of the preceding century. The subsequent retreat of the queen's uncle, lord Rochester, is predicted by Parnell, who describes the Whig oligarchy as mustering their forces on the night of the death of William; after sketching Sunderland under the name of Cethego, he makes Montagu, lord Halifax, boast of his literary influence in a speech which marks the position of most of the authors of Anne's reign, at the commencement— "Congreve, for me, Pastora's death did mourn, This was a mawkish elegy which Congreve wrote on the death of Mary II., whom he panegyrized under the affected name of Pastora. Authors of coarse worldly comedies are poor hands at elegies. "Rowe, too, is mine; and of the Whiggish train, This is Rowe, the author of "Jane Shore," and "The Fair Penitent." Immortal "Tamerlane," in whom the revolutionists affected to recognise William III. is a ranting tragedy long defunct. "I helped to polish Garth's rough awkward lays, Taught him in tuneful lines to sound our party's praise." Norfolk, condemned to death by Henry VIII., was seized for the use of Edward VI., and after remaining in one of the royal residences till this reign, was carried off by William III. for the adornment of Loo. Other antiquities of furniture and ornament, in which Windsor is so strangely deficient, were, according to this contemporary, abstracted by the same king for the same purpose, and may be found at his Dutch pleasure-palace. 1 William III.'s window-taxes, usually supposed to have been invented by Pitt. Samuel Garth was a political physician, who was more renowned for poems than pills; his name is still in the public memory, although his poems are utterly forgotten.' He was personally abusive to queen Anne during her reign, and drew the attention of her enemies to her excesses at the table. "Walsh votes for us, who, though he never writ, The memory of Walsh chiefly survives in Pope's and Swift's letters; he was a member of parliament, with literary tastes. "Van's vulgar plotless plays were once my boast, But now the poet's in the builder lost." Vanbrugh is here indicated, the author of "The Provoked Husband," and the Architect of Blenheim. "On Addison we safely may depend, A pension never fails to gain a friend; Through Alpine hills he shall my name resound, Addison was then making a classic tour, being enabled to travel, by a pension allowed him by Halifax. His publication on that tour is one of his earliest works. He afterwards returned the obligation, by supporting, with his own pen and that of his ally, Steele, the ministry that had patronized him. Steele is not named in this list, which is surprising, since he was the most headlong of their partywriters. Parnell proceeds to versify some known expressions of Halifax on the power of literary aid: "Princes but sit unsettled on their thrones, Shall feel the vengeance of the poet's pen." No one among the list, however, personally attacked the queen but Garth, who alluded, in no measured phrases to her supposed propensity of imbibing more than did her good. Parnell himself concludes this singular poem with 'Garth has far better claims to immortality than his verses could give. He was the first physician of his age who suggested the idea of dispensaries where advice was given gratis to the poor. He may be considered the founder of those benevolent institutions, at least in modern times. His poem of "The Dispensary" was a satire on the interested quacks and apothecaries who opposed the charity. an elegant tribute to the memory of the lately lost son of the queen, whom he terms the Marcellus of the English nation. He speaks highly of the queen's uncle, lord Rochester; and truly foretells that the queen's favourite, lady Marlborough, will dispossess him of all power. "I foresee his fate, To be supplanted by Sempronia's hate, The senate's grievance and the court's disgrace.") Such was the first attack on lady Marlborough in the reign of queen Anne. The unmeasured hatred of this person to the family of Clarendon, especially to lord Rochester, was, for a long time, the leading principle of her life. The queen's natural affection towards her uncle, produced the first disputes between her and Sarah of Marlborough, who, strong in her alliance with the house of Sunderland, scarcely condescended to acknowledge herself to be the favourite of queen Anne; but hinted that her queen was a very humble-minded person exceedingly obliged to her. The career of lord Sunderland was, at the accession of Anne, nearly at its end. All his dark schemes. had succeeded, and the unbounded power of the triumphant oligarchy was before him. The last turn of fortune's wheel had brought him to the top, but life is too short to work the complex machinery which it had been the employment of this statesman's subtle brain to devise. Just as all lord Sunderland's contrivances were perfected, he was forced to be occupied with nothing but infirmity, conscience, and death. Queen Anne had scarcely ascended the throne, when, influenced, as it is supposed, by her uncle, Rochester, she manifested anxiety to effect a reconciliation with the venerable bishop Ken, who was considered the head of the Reformed Church of England. She sent a nobleman, his personal friend, who held a high place in her confidence, to seek the deprived bishop, to inform him that the conforming dissenter Kidder, whom her sister had placed in his bishopric, should be removed from his intrusion into the see of Bath and Wells, if he, Dr. Ken, would swear allegiance to her, and resume his prelatic state and revenues. The queen is said to have added, “ that it was her intention 1 This is another allusion to some mysterious blot on the lineage of the duchess of Marlborough. |